Franklin Dam controversy

Because not only do you have a duplication of responsibilities, you'll often get one level of government nullifying what the other level of government is trying to do.

This has particularly become a problem since the Tasmanian dams decision in 1983, otherwise known as the Franklin Dam decision, because Bob Hawke took the Tasmanian government to court and used the Foreign Powers Treaty to say that if we sign a treaty with any government you know, other international organisation, it can override the plenary powers of the state.

So what you end up with is a situation a few years ago whereby, you know, a gold miner, you know, a gold mining company spent something like $150 million on getting environmental approvals to build a gold mine near Orange and then 10-year Plibersec because, you know, there'd be a treaty somewhere to do with cultural affairs and was able to come in and override the New South Wales government's power to actually approve a gold mine and its environmental aspects.

So what you've got now is because of this foreign treaties power, you can have the federal government literally override the state government on just about any issue it chooses.

So yet again yesterday when we saw that issue about the scope three emissions, that shouldn't have even been in the High Court.

It wouldn't have been in the High Court if it wasn't for the Franklin Dam decision.

Now, yet again, as much as I love our founding fathers, and I think they did a fantastic job in setting up a great government, and, you know, guys like Deakin and Barton and all those early guys, you know, and even on the Labor side, they set up a public bank, et cetera, we were very, very lucky that we had a great set of founding fathers.

Very similar, you know, what happened to us in the early 20th century and the sort of leaders we have are comparable to what America had Around the time of the American Revolution with Jefferson and Washington, we managed to have the similar type of thing 125 years later.

While it's called the external affairs power, this can be also used for domestic issues within Australia.

A famous example is the case of the Franklin Dam, which was a proposed dam that the Tasmanian state government was going to build, but the area was declared a World Heritage Site.

So the plans attracted a lot of environmental protests.

The federal government in 1983 used the external affairs power to intervene and prevent the state government from building the dam.

And I think, like, that's, that's gonna require, yes, it'll require action in parliament, which is something that I was part of for a long period, but it's also, like history tells us, that you'd need to have sort of some pretty strong and organized forces outside of parliament pushing for that as well.

It's how they stopped the Franklin Dam, for example.

And, um, we wanna build up another Franklin Dam size and style campaign again, uh, in the lead up to the next election.

Well, yeah, I, I, I hear your ambition there, and it sounds like you're, you're, um, mostly happy, uh, with being outside of the parliament doing that work.

So would you think about running again?